Tuesday, March 08, 2016

The crocodile tears of a dead religion

Don't bite my head off, but Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God, the Light of the World and the Son of God, declared,

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.—Matthew 5:17

There are, of course, those who lived under the illusion that they could trick the Son of Man into implicating himself in some theological scandal so that they could hand him over to the temple authorities for some righteous rapping of the knuckles. So the Great Teacher came up with a clever dodge of His own; He wasn't interested in re-writing the canon law that had prevailed since the beginning of time except to ensure that the spirit of that canon law be fulfilled.

I find it significant that the Christ did not establish Christianity; that was left to the Apostles and their descendants. It is significant because what the Apostles and all those who followed in their footsteps did was, in fact, to "destroy the law [and] the prophets." The early Christians may not have known what would happen to the religion they founded in the name of the Christ, but it bears very little in common with the teachings of the Christ, and in its myriad denominations are to be found the demons that the Christ hoped to drive out from among us.

It has been 8 years since Kenyans were murdered and driven from their homes in one of the worst political crises since the Little General Election of 1969 and the failed coup d'etat of 1982. Not even the 1990-1992 land clashes nor the 1997 ethnic clashes came close to the severity of the 2008 crisis. In those 8 years, with the help of good Christian bishops and apostles, men and women who suborned the murder of their neighbours have been sanitised by the blood of Jesus, declared innocent before the eyes of God and man, freed from responsibility for the deaths of thousands, the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands and the corruption of the due process of the law for those seeking justice in man's courtrooms.

We, the people, have stood silently by as what we believe to be lives of faith are rendered hypocritical by the men and women who speak of the bible and claim to speak the Word of God. We are complicit as we bear witness to the desecration of the Holy Word, the barefaced lies disguised as gospel truth. We enable the marauding of false witnesses, unaware that, though they pretend to be meek in their sheep's clothing they are but ravening wolves intent on tearing us limb from limb. Because we have been silent and complicit, there are families that have never known a night of judicial peace because the courts of law are forever hostile territory for them despite the pain and anguish of their losses. If we are not careful, "Christian" will one day be used as an epithet and on that day claims of persecution will be the crocodile tears of a dead religion.